


You Found Me (made me into something new)

by Haicrescendo



Series: Carry On For You [8]
Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender, Pocket Monsters | Pokemon - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe, Canon has been taken out back and shot, Gen, alternating pov, and so annoyed, but cannot be considered cruelty-free, druk is so tired, even if that means force feeding him crickets, lab rat’s revenge on science, oops it’s definitely pokémon abuse, peony is determined to take care of her person, some good old fashioned arson, this fic was not tested on pokémon, tiny Zuko is doing his best, which is at least better than peony is managing, with some collateral damage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-28
Updated: 2020-02-28
Packaged: 2021-02-20 03:28:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,194
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22942492
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Haicrescendo/pseuds/Haicrescendo
Summary: [It’s born in a cage, in a lab that’s all stark white and generic blandness.It’s alone, no mother or siblings present, just a face swimming in front of its shaky, infant vision. The face is considering and then ecstatic, and it feels a jerk of happiness, the first feeling it ever has.It’s hungry but also tired, and wants to know about the world.]Or,The origin story of Zuko’s fire-breathing Pikachu.
Series: Carry On For You [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1599013
Comments: 190
Kudos: 2413





	You Found Me (made me into something new)

**Author's Note:**

> Everyone who ever asked me questions about Peony—this one’s for you!! 
> 
> As always, if you enjoyed this please leave me a comment and let me know! Feedback fuels the writer. I can also be found on tumblr @sword-and-stars, where I can be found screaming about fictional characters.

* * *

  
It’s born in a cage, in a lab that’s all stark white and generic blandness.

It’s alone, no mother or siblings present, just a face swimming in front of its shaky, infant vision. The face is considering and then ecstatic, and it feels a jerk of happiness, the first feeling it ever has.

It’s hungry but also tired, and wants to know about the world.

Is this person its mother?

This person is happy to see it, and it chirps at them. It wants out of the cage, wants to be close to them, wants food and love and all those other things that babies need.

_Let me out_ , it cries, and pushes against the bars as hard as it can. _Let me out_!

Mama doesn’t let it out of the cage, just slides a bowl of food in through a little slat in the bottom.

“You’re going to make me millions,” Mama tells it, and it’s happy. It’s made Mama happy, for the first time, and that makes it happy too. 

It doesn’t dream, when it sleeps. 

* * *

Mama isn’t happy a lot.

Sometimes it’s left alone for days at a time with no interactions other than being fed. The food is the same every day.

Sometimes, it gets hooked up to a box that makes loud, frightening noises, and it tries not to cry out, because that might make Mama angry.

“You’ve got the ability,” Mama says sometimes, staring at it in its cage. “So why won’t you _use it_?”

It doesn’t know what they want. It does its best but it never seems to be the right thing.

It stops waiting for Mama to hold it and love it. This is how Mama cares—with angry words and demands to be better. It does its best, and it’s not enough.

Finally, Mama stops asking it to do what it doesn’t know what to do.

“Fine,” they say one day, glaring at it. “If you won’t use your fire, maybe it will be bred into your offspring.”

So it’s not alone, now, but that doesn’t make it better.

There’s another one in its cage now, that looks the same but bigger and wrong, somehow. 

_Young?_ They ask it. An offer. _Offspring_?

_No,_ it says back. _Don’t want and can’t have._

Whatever choices led to it possessing fire that it cannot use have bred out any reproductive prerogative. Even now, if it were to try, it knows that nothing would come out of it.

So for a while it has company in its cage, but it’s not long before Mama gets mad again.

This time it’s worse because they reach in and take it out, and shake it until it can’t breathe, and hurl it to the ground.

“Useless piece of garbage!” They shout.

It shakes, frightened, and then suddenly furious.

It’s done everything, _everything_ that it could, and all it’s gotten out of it is pain.

And then there’s only fire.

* * *

Zuko jerks awake to the smell of smoke.

His own campfire’s run down to embers, but he can see grey clouds of smoke floating over the treeline. He scrambles out of his sleeping bag and doesn’t for a moment think that maybe he should be moving _away_ from it.

This doesn’t smell like a campfire, and it doesn’t even smell like a forest fire.

It’s worse.

Zuko stumbles upon the remains of a smouldering building. The flames themselves have died but everything smokes and he claps a hand over his mouth and nose before he can start coughing. It’s thick and heavy and the closer he gets, the harder it is to see. His eyes sting and water.

“Hello?” He calls. “Anybody there? Can anyone hear me?”

There’s no answer, and Zuko moves closer, shuffling through a blackened doorway. 

He knows, despite it all, that if there were any people inside before the fire started, there aren’t anymore.

He trips and nearly falls, catches himself on a wall so hot it nearly burns his palm, looks down to see what he tripped over—and immediately bends in half to throw up everything he had in his stomach.

Zuko had tripped over a body.

It’s burnt up and charred but not enough to change what it was. What it _is_. Next to the human body is the body of a Ditto. His body shakes with dry heaves but there’s nothing left to come up, and finally he manages to straighten up, wiping his mouth.

“Shit,” he mumbles under his breath. He can’t stay in here for long; his throat’s already beginning to tighten up and air’s coming harder from smoke inhalation.

It looks like it used to be a lab. Not a big lab, just one room, and not a good one. What’s not burned tells an awful story that’s going to play in the back of his head for a long, long time.

There’s a scuttling little rustle behind him, and Zuko whips around, and then there’s flame heading for his _face_ , and he flinches uselessly into the crook of his arm. There’s a flash of light and a snarl and the sounds of a scuffle.

When Zuko can finally make himself look up, he sees Druk, a newly evolved Charmeleon since last week, holding to the ground a screaming, squeaking Pikachu. It’s skinny and sooty and struggling in Druk’s hold. Zuko is confused about where the fire came from until it releases a shriek of rage and a plume of flame shoots out of its mouth. 

“Okay, it’s okay,” Zuko says lowly, tries to be useful instead of stunned. He approaches with caution. It’s weakening quickly under Druk’s claws and then abruptly stops struggling, going limp as if giving up.

He can’t just leave it here.

Druk gives him a curious growl and Zuko kneels down, reaching out and bundling the Pikachu into his arms.

“Come on,” he says, “We’re going back to camp. I don’t think we’re going to find anything else here.”

At least not anything else that he’s going to like.

* * *

Pikachu has not been well cared for.

That becomes more obvious the closer Zuko looks at her. It is a her, and she’s young; not a baby but still growing. Before she wakes up, Zuko rubs a damp cloth over her fur to try and clean off the soot but that doesn’t do anything about the ribs showing through her dull, yellow coat.

“You can stop looming, Druk,” Zuko tells his pokémon firmly. Druk grumbles at him, reluctant to return to his pokéball, and sticks close by anyway.

Zuko would have been lying if he said that a Pikachu breathing fire hadn’t put him on edge, and not just because of the expansive burn scar that takes up a quarter of his face. He’s had it for four years; he’s had time to get used to it.

He’s over it.

(Zuko is not over it.)

* * *

It wakes up and it’s afraid.

_Don’t_ , the red one grumbles at it, _I don’t want to hurt you, but I will to protect him. You are tiny and scared, but you aren’t allowed to hurt him._

It— _she_ , shakes and trembles in the bundle of fabric wrapped around her. Everything is new and frightening, and she misses the cage and white walls and knowing exactly she could or could not go.

The other one—the one like Mama but different, is watching her now.

_He is mine_ , the red one says, _and you don’t have to be afraid of him. He is gentle and kind and will not hurt you. He could be yours too, if you’d like._

She ignores him in favor of staring at the other one, who stares right back.

She growls at him and his lips tilt up.

“It’s okay, baby, it’s okay. You don’t have to be scared. It’s okay—“ he reaches out a hand, fingers outstretched.

She bites down, _hard_ , and tastes blood.

* * *

Zuko clenches his jaw and forces himself to be still and not shake his hand the way instinct demands. It _hurts_ , though, it hurts a lot, and the little Pikachu doesn’t seem inclined to let go anytime soon.

“Easy; it’s fine, quit your fussing,” he tells Druk between gritted teeth, “It’s just a bite. It’s _fine_.”

Druk pointedly restarts the campfire with a tiny fireball and does not relax even a little.

“How long are you going to keep your teeth in me?” Zuko asks, and reaches out with his free and unbloody hand to rub the little pokémon’s chin. The moment he touches her, she goes completely still, like a little statue inside the cocoon of one of his hoodies.

Slowly she lets go.

* * *

The other one is...touching her.

The other one is touching her, and it doesn’t hurt.

She’s distracted by the touch on her chin, so distracted that her grip on his hand loosens, and she finds herself letting go.

“There we go, it’s okay.”

His voice is soft and quiet. Mama was often quiet but never soft, and never touched her if they didn’t have to. She didn’t realize that hands on her could be anything other than painful or clinical.

Soft-and-quiet’s hands aren’t just the absence of pain.

The touch feels _good._ The first good touch she’s ever had.

_What are you_? 

The red one glares at her, keeping watch over the fire.

_Are you quite finished? All this drama._

She ignores him.

Soft-and-quiet pulls his injured hand away from her teeth and wraps it in a towel.

“That hurt,” he says, “Please don’t do it again.”

She’s not sorry, but she wants the good touch to come back, and props herself up on his knee, stretching herself up towards his hand. He obliges, this time scratching behind her ears, the groove between her shoulders, the base of her tail. 

This is something that she’s missed out on that she never knew was even an option.

And she made him bleed for it.

* * *

Zuko ignores the persistent twinge in his hand and focuses on acclimating Pikachu to his touch. It takes a bit, but it’s not long before she’s pressing herself into it. He can feel all of her little bones just under her skin, and that won’t do at all.

She still looks so afraid but tries so hard to be brave.

He doesn’t begrudge her the bite, even though it hurts.

“There we go,” he tells her, “That’s good, right? You’ve had a rough start but people aren’t totally bad. A lot of them are, but not all.” He doesn’t even want to know what Azula would do with an electric type that somehow has the ability to _breathe fire._

Zuko cuts that line of thinking off at the source.

He still hasn’t learned how to think about his sister and breathe at the same time.

“See? That’s not too bad, is it? I’m not gonna hurt you.”

Pikachu inches closer, up his knee to clamber onto his thigh, then scrabbles up his shirt.

Zuko yelps.

“ _Ow_ , claws _,”_ he protests and fishes her out. “That hurts.”

She yells at him.

“Okay, _here_ , try this,” Zuko mumbles and tucks her into the crook of his neck, over his shirt but inside his hoodie, “Don’t bite me.” 

She doesn’t bite, but falls in love instead.

* * *

Soft-and-quiet has a name but it takes a long time for it to stick.

Soft-and-quiet is also...often not quiet at all, she finds. He never yells at her or the red one, or the much smaller red one (who also have names) but he yells a lot at just about everyone else. She’s afraid, at first, as much as she wants to be near him, and he makes an effort not to shout so much where she can hear him.

Soft-and-quiet always feeds them. Sometimes he doesn’t feed himself. Maybe he hasn’t learned how, she thinks, and tries to stuff a cricket into his mouth.

The red one, Druk, laughs so hard he nearly burns down a tree.

Soft-and-quiet finds it less funny. He doesn’t eat her cricket but makes a pointed effort to eat more where she can see it.

_He forgets, sometimes, when he’s unhappy_ , Druk tells her. _Sometimes he needs a reminder._

She can do that. She’s _good_ at hunting! She’ll make sure that he eats, even if she has to do the hunting for him.

Soft-and-quiet— _Zuko,_ she tries to remember, is tempestuous and emotional. He feels things hard and reacts just as hard. It should be frightening but to her, he’s never anything but gentle.

She doesn’t know much about people but she can recognize dislike, and the other humans dislike his attitude and the way he doesn’t ingratiate himself. She _likes_ that about him, likes that he’s picky about his company.

Likes that he chose her.

So in the end, she chooses him right back.

She slips up, sometimes.

Sometimes when she’s not paying attention, or she’s woken up suddenly from a nap, she forgets where she is and bites with teeth or sparks of lightning. Once, just once, flame comes out instead and Druk makes a solid attempt to smother her into the dirt while Soft-and-quiet presses his face into his hands and doesn’t breathe right. 

She’s _sorry_. 

She’s never really wished for words before but she wishes that she could say sorry in a way that he can understand, because she _is_ , she’s _so sorry_. She doesn’t ever want to hurt him.

Druk eventually lets her up with minimal snarling (he understands but his protective nature will always trump his understanding, and she gets it), and she scampers over to Soft-and-quiet, stopping several feet away. Maybe this is where it finally ends.

Maybe this is where he tells her to go, and never come back.

Maybe this is where the line gets drawn.

She doesn’t want to go. She doesn’t want him to tell her to go away. She doesn’t want to leave him, but she will if that’s what he wants.

She sinks to all fours, belly to the ground, tail down and head lowered. He looks up, pale-faced and shaky. Slowly, slowly, he reaches out a hand to her.

“Come here, baby,” he says. She creeps closer. “It’s okay. It’s okay. I know you didn’t mean it.” 

When she’s close enough, he scoops her into his arms and cuddles her to his chest. She can feel the hard thud of his heart and presses herself closer, closing her eyes to listen to it.

She can’t let this happen again.

* * *

“I don’t know what to do.”

Zuko has his phone propped up in front of him. He’s on a video call with Uncle in the pokémon center of Goldenrod City. He misses him, and he misses Master Piandao, but technology makes him less lonely when he travels.

The farther he goes, sometimes, the better he feels.

“I think the biggest question you need to answer is: what is your goal? Do you want to keep her from using fire or would you like her to be more comfortable with it instead?” Uncle’s face is serene as he takes a sip of tea, and his calm helps Zuko be calm, too.

He props his chin up on his hands.

“I don’t think keeping her from using it will work that well,” he says, finally. “She doesn’t like using it much anyway. But she gets scared and…”

“And then she can’t control it,” Uncle finishes.

“Right. So I guess...get her more comfortable with it?”

“And how are _you_ doing with it?”

Zuko scowls.

“I’m doing just fine.”

“Mhmm.” Uncle doesn’t contradict him but Zuko feels like he’s being judged a little anyway. He’s always been a bad liar.

“It’s just...it’s easier with Druk and Foxglove. They’re fire types, so that’s what they’re supposed to have. And I—“ Zuko cuts himself off.

“You trust them, more than you do the little one. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. You have a longer relationship with them, and trust them not to put their fire into your face. No one is judging you for it.”

Zuko is judging himself for it.

Self-consciously, he rubs a hand over his face. He’s used to the idea of the scar, by now. He’ll never _like_ it, but it’s a part of him and it’s never going away.

“I want her to be less scared, in general,” he mumbles. “She only loses control because she’s afraid. It’s not her fault.”

Uncle’s face goes soft and warm and sentimental and Zuko finds that he can’t look at it for too long.

“I’m so proud to have such a kindhearted nephew.”

“ _Uncle_. Quit it.”

Uncle’s smile only widens and Zuko flushes, buries his face in his arms.

“When I’m Vulca’s gym leader,” he mumbles, “I’ll make sure that stuff like that doesn’t happen anymore.”

Uncle Iroh gets very quiet and when Zuko lifts his head, the man is staring at him. His face is a mix of pride and horror.

Zuko hasn’t talked much about his end goals. He hasn’t said much of anything about it to Uncle or even Piandao, because they’ll definitely try and talk him out of it. Uncle’s face now reminds him of why he’s kept it to himself.

“Zuko, please.”

“I’m not _stupid,”_ Zuko snaps, “I’m not going back until I’m ready.” _Until I can win._ “But I _will_ go back, and I’ll _win_ , and I’m going to make it better. I’m going to fix it. I swear. When I’m strong enough, I’m going _home_ , and I’m taking it back.”

Uncle stares at him, clearly conflicted, but eventually nods his head in acceptance.

“I can’t stop you,” he says, and Zuko feels just a twinge of disappointment until he continues, “And I know that it would be a fool’s errand to try. You are so much more than what they think you are, and so much better. Whatever you need from me, Zuko, you have. You only ever have to ask. Even if all it is is some extra money in your bank account.”

“ _Uncle,”_ Zuko mumbles, exasperated. “Don’t send me money. I’m _fine_. I battled enough businessmen today to keep going for a while.”

“I’ll send what I like.”

“Don’t send any more tea either.”

“I told you, young one, I’ll send what I like.”

Zuko sticks his tongue out.

“When I’m Vulca’s gym leader, I’m going to ban tea-drinking in the gym.”

“I would like to see you try.”

* * *

She’s afraid. 

She’s so afraid she can’t move, standing in front of Druk. She knows him and she trusts him, but it doesn’t make her less afraid.

Soft-and-quiet, _Zuko, Zuko, Zuko_ , stands behind her. He’s very still but vibrating with energy, arms crossed over his chest. 

“Hey,” he says, “Hey. It’s okay. You can do it, okay? You can trust me, Peony.”

Zuko’s saved her, touched her, fed her, and now he’s _named_ her, too.

_Ready_? Druk asks.

It—she— _Peony_ , pops up on her hind legs and shows her teeth. 

_Ready_. Right now, she feels like she could do anything.

“Alright, then! Peony, use flamethrower!”

Peony breathes in, then _out,_ and fire erupts.

* * *

  
  



End file.
